This Is Not Who We Are

1994, Iris and Victoria are pen friends. Iris writes about her life with her family in Paris. Victoria is in a refugee camp in Goma having fled the genocide in Rwanda in which thousands are being killed. One day Victoria’s letters stop, and Iris is told she has been moved. 1994, Iris and Victoria are pen friends. Iris writes about her life with her family in Paris. Victoria is in a refugee camp in Goma having fled the genocide in Rwanda in which thousands are being killed. One day Victoria’s letters stop, and Iris is told she has been moved. One day Victoria’s letters stop, and Iris is told she has been moved.

Twenty years later Iris is working as a journalist in London: her thoughts return to Victoria and what might have happened to her. Pitching a story to her editor sets her on a journey to find her pen friend. As she follows the story, things emerge that make her question her own past. Was her father, a French government official, involved in the genocide? Are her childhood memories more fiction than fact? Why is she looking for Victoria, really?

For Victoria, the last twenty years have been ones of migration, to Goma, then to Paris and finally to London. There she starts a new life with her brother Paul, and leaves the past behind. Or so she thinks until she is suddenly confronted with the decision to reconnect with her genocide-supporting middle brother Benjamin.